Charlottesville. The real shock for anyone is that anyone should be shocked at all at what happened. Not me. On the contrary, I've been pointing out something like this could happen, with the exact sort of scenario, for a long time.

Firstly, let's address some of the underlying causes. There are many people in the American South who feel their heritage is under attack. There are many Americans who feel they are being demonised because they are white males. This is hardly an exclusively American problem, it is just as much a British and Australian one. And that's why I'm so leery about the Confederate controversy. Because it's not such a small step for the situation to repeat itself anywhere else, especially now our own heritage is under attack in this country.

In such an environment, it's no surprise there has been some kind of backlash. It's not much of a surprise either that we have seen the "White Nationalist" crowd, basically neo-Nazis (Heimbach, Schoep et al), see an opportunity to place themselves front and centre of the backlash. They are no friends of ours. In fact, such neo-Nazis are either fools or provocateurs - people who serve the interest of the enemy by discrediting any legitimate cause they attach themselves to.

In fact, what they've given is a gift to the Left. They have given them a stick with which they can beat anyone with, to discredit opponents of their agenda. This is what the neo-Nazi boneheads have done.

Part of the problem is our lack of a sense of perspective. We have been told for decades that our very history and our very existence is an original sin, which can only be redeemed by full immersion into the "Diversity" religion. We are told that Nazism is a unique historical evil while the equal if not greater crimes of Communism are ignored. All of this are ingredients for the backlash you currently see now.

In Eastern Europe, a strong sense of nationalism is still mainstream. In Western Europe, North America and Australia, this has been frowned upon by the elites. The result is a dangerous vacuum which is being filled by the above.

Were the protesters in Charlottesville within their constitutional rights to march? Strictly-speaking, they were. And so were the Leftist counter-protesters within their rights to protest as well. The Constitution does not discriminate on the matter.

But please, spare me the sanctimony. Most people on the MAINSTREAM Right have distanced themselves from the inane White Nationalist crowd now posing as the Alt-Right. A great part of the MAINSTREAM Left have not repudiated extremism and associated violence, but have often indulged or covered it up. Promoting the work of people like Linda Sarsour is one such example, given her associations. We have seen violent radical Leftists attack people who are not even anywhere near the "White Nationalist" term. Milo at Berkeley anyone?

We've seen this scenario before. It was 1936 in Spain. It wasn't the Nationalists who began the lawless killing of politicians and journalists then. Where will this one all end?

I thought Trump got it mostly right. The violence did come from both sides. In the US, at least, there is a right to peaceful protest, and, as reprehensible as they are, that applies to Neo-Nazis. The US supreme court has indeed ruled on that. Many of the hard left counter protestors here seem to have turned up with the express motive of putting down the original protest by violence, which is what happened, especially since many of the white supremacists were clearly not about to back down when confronted, and many had been expecting and even hoping for confrontations. Yes, some nutter decided to drive his car into leftwing protestors (although there is some suggestion he did this only after he was surrounded and threatened by them, hence he has been charged with second degree murder). But there was plenty of violence to go around. Some of the leftwing extremists even seem to have attacked a couple of journalists.

It is hard to say, but I think Trump got it right. It is not surprising the left-liberal media is attacking him for an attempt at balance and proportion. They always ignore this kind of left-liberal violence when they can. In Britain you never hear, for example, the truth that most violence and disorder at BNP, EDL rallies and the like is initiated by the sorry bunch called anti-fascists. The irony of the fact that it took two days for it to have been forgotten that a leftwing radical tried to kill several Republican congressmen (except when the Washington Post revived the story to try to blame rightwing shock jocks for it), whilst they are milking this for all they can get, is huge and yet to be expected.

Anyway, I don't think the white supremacists are important. In a country of three hundred million and more, it is easy for a few thousand nutters to come together like this. That they're happy about Trump is not very relevant. It is the same kind of stuff you hear about UKIP having BNP and far-right support. Yes, if a party or politician actually wants to do something about open borders, for once, that might excite the far-right, because we've had decades of little being done. But doing something about open borders and the like is not necessarily far-right in itself. It is just, therefore, guilt by association.

I must say, though, I can't imagine General Lee would have been very impressed at the motley crew of his defenders.

President Trump has been on the defensive over his remarks about the disturbances in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the weekend. Clashes between fascist types and their opponents over the city’s removal of confederate monuments turned deadly when a presumed white supremacist drove a car into the counter-demonstrators, killing one person and injuring many others.

In response, Trump condemned the “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides”.

His failure until yesterday to single out the white supremacists for censure has provoked a storm of criticism, not least from Republicans.

Trump’s initial response was indeed inadequate. Much more worrying, though, was what actually happened. For this was not, as widely portrayed, a clash between fascists and anti-fascists. It was between two groups each of which perpetrate hatred and intolerance, stand against freedom and seek to impose their views of society and human nature by force.

The “unite the right” demonstration brought on to the streets neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other racist extremists. The sight of them marching with swastika flags and flaming torches was stomach-turning. But ranged against them were the “Antifa”, self-designated anti-fascists who are anything but. They have a record of unprovoked violence, rioting and thuggery. Their Black Lives Matter offshoot includes racists who incite violence against white people.

Since Trump’s ascendancy, there have been repeated outbreaks of violence, mostly perpetrated by Antifa against ordinary Republicans and other conservatives, either at pro-Trump rallies or on other public platforms. These people have been either stopped from speaking or physically attacked by Antifa and other left-wing demonstrators.

Such attacks on mainstream conservatives have been ignored, downplayed or even endorsed by Democrats and their media acolytes.

In June the House Republican whip, Steve Scalise, was shot and almost killed by a Bernie Sanders-supporting Democrat who opened fire on a group of Republicans at a baseball practice. A New Jersey Democratic party activist, James Devine, posted on his Facebook page that he had “little sympathy” for Scalise because he opposed gun restriction policies. Another Democratic party official in Nebraska was fired after saying he was “glad” that Scalise had been shot.

The Democratic establishment dismisses such people as mavericks with no significance for the left-wing causes they support. Yet a double standard operates against President Trump, who is held to be personally defined by the unacceptable nature of a tiny minority of his supporters.

The fact that the former Ku Klux Klan “grand wizard” David Duke, who was at Charlottesville, claims to support Trump’s agenda (that is, when he’s not in the next breath condemning him) is being used to smear Trump himself as a white supremacist.

It is grotesque to equate Trump’s pledge to “make America great again”, which was endorsed by the 63 million Americans who voted for him, with the bigotry of white supremacism. The former is driven by people wanting to uphold core American values they deeply cherish and share with each other. The latter is driven by loathing of racial and ethnic groups deemed to be inferior.

In last year’s presidential campaign Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Will Quigg, “grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan’s California chapter. He claimed she had a “hidden agenda” and that if elected she would come out for gun ownership and sealing America’s borders. Quigg’s support of Clinton was rightly dismissed as either mischief-making or barking mad. Yet when such people support Trump, this is held to define him.

There are various possible reasons why Trump didn’t specifically condemn the far right in Charlottesville. He may resent being bullied into stating what he considers should be obvious: that he thinks such people are vicious extremists. He may believe that both warring sides had unconscionable agendas.

Whatever his reason, his generalised remarks were ill-judged. As US president, he inescapably delineates the contours of what is socially acceptable and what is beyond the pale. He should therefore have specifically denounced white supremacism as having no place in American society. At the same time, he should have specifically condemned the hatemongering ideology of left-wing identity politics.

Such a response was not just morally but politically necessary. For the left’s real target is not the far right but mainstream conservatives who want to uphold American values and culture: the people who brought Trump to power. Defending national identity, however, is denounced by western progressives as white racism.

The result is an unholy alliance between the left and the far right. A white supremacist called Richard Spencer invented the blanket term “alt-right” to associate his ilk with conservatives seeking merely to defend American identity and core values. Through this tactic, Spencer intended to boost the far right and simultaneously smear and thus destroy regular conservatives.

The left has seized upon this smear with unbridled joy, routinely using the “alt-right” term to try to destroy the national identity agenda by bracketing it with white supremacism. The result is a powerful boost for the far right. From deserved obscurity, they suddenly find the left are transmitting their every utterance to the world. The phrase “useful idiots” comes inescapably to mind.

Charlottesville was but the latest front in what has become America’s cultural civil war. It won’t, alas, be the last.

Melanie Phillips' latest article in The Times and the Australian has a few salient points. Firstly, she pointed out that the real target of the Left is not the "white nationalist" or neo-Nazi Far Right (who have been given renewed - and unprecedented - publicity by their latest "exploits" by virtue of the media), but the mainstream conservative Right. People like me who are conservative, patriotic and uphold Western civilisation. Especially living in Australia, where we feel the impress of a Left attack on the very foundations of this country, this really ought to rackle.

She also mentioned that a) extremists like Richard Spencer have sought to infiltrate the conservative movement and b) seek ultimately to discredit and "replace" mainstream conservatism with their brand of neo-fascism. Again, this is precisely what the Left would love to see: a collapse of the mainstream Right and the space being filled by the Far Right.

As I said earlier today, the lot of us could easily be accused of being "white supremacists" because we believe in defending British and Western civilisation and point out some very un-PC truths about the past and present (e.g. Southern Africa and the whole decolonisation issue). We refuse to believe our history is some Original Sin and be emotionally blackmailed. They're not after people like Richard Spencer and David Duke primarily, they're after people like Phillips, Andrew Bolt, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Mark Latham, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrew Rosindell, myself and others who refuse to be bow to fashionable opinion.

In fact, what groups like the SPLC have done is lump in legitimate conservatives with the neo-Nazi crowd. And what the SPLC and ADL rely on, undoubtedly, is more provocation by extremists so they can remain relevant since they can collect donations. Even if the information they publish on neo-Nazis isn't inaccurate, where do you think they get that information from? Especially when some of these boneheads are all to keen to discredit competitors in their OWN movement!

Some on our side haven't helped our cause by refusing to be aware of the dangers of flirting with the Far Right crowd, and the dangers it poses to causes we cherish. Some people even got defensive when I highlighted this issue. I'm afraid to say you shouldn't have been. I'm not someone who says things without reason and evidence.

In recent decades, most of us on the Right have consciously distanced ourselves from extremism. Some people have tried to invite them back again, threatening our cause. You only need to look at what certain other movements did in throwing out their lunatic fringe (I won't mention which ones, but you can guess).

The US President routinely uses Twitter to slam all manner of people, from Democrats to Republicans to televisions hosts, in 140 characters or less.

His early tweets last weekend lacked their usual clarity when 20-year-old Ohio man James Alex Fields drove his grey Dodge into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a woman and injuring 19 others. Donald Trump should have mustered some fire and fury against the white supremacists, members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis who marched on the weekend to anti-Semitic chants and homophobic rants in Charlottes­ville.

While criticism came from both sides of the political aisle, the left’s hysteria over Trump’s response to the Unite the Right rally packs no punch because the eagerness to label evil doesn’t stretch far beyond white supremacists. When it comes to putting a name on Islamic terrorism, the ­reaction is very different. It’s a case of what Mark Steyn calls tilty-headed wankerishness. No naming evil here, only candlelit vigils, hashtag campaigns and inclusive interfaith dialogues.

In March, after 52-year-old Briton Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, the Dean of Westminster, John R. Hall, announced that the nation was bewildered.

“What could possibly ­motivate a man to hire a car and take it from Birmingham to Brighton to London, and then drive it fast at people he had never met, couldn’t possibly know, against whom he had no personal grudge, no reason to hate them, and then run at the gates of the Palace of Westminster to cause another death? It seems likely that we shall never know,” Hall said soon after the attack.

Except we did know. But when it comes to Islamic terrorism, labelling evil gives over to mumbling, fumbling dissembling. It’s a curious lapse in moral clarity given that Islamic terrorists have no time for Christianity, let alone religious freedoms or women and the feminist cause, or homosexuals, let alone LGBTI rights.

The thundering hysteria against Trump after Charlottesville is another case of the left’s wonky moral compass.

CNN hosts censured Trump for not immediately condemning the white supremacists spoiling for a fight last weekend. But the faces of CNN didn’t rally to label evil regarding Westminster Bridge, or when another Islamic terrorist rammed a truck at a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, or when an Islamic terrorist mowed down pedestrians on a promenade in Nice on Bastille Day last year.

After an Islamic terrorist detonated a bomb and murdered teenagers at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May, London mayor Sadiq Khan didn’t condemn Islamic State — even though the terrorist group claimed responsibility. It was the same in June after three Islamic terrorists mowed into pedestrians on London Bridge before going from bar to bar, stabbing and slicing at patrons with 30cm hunting knives. Not even a clue from one of the ­Islamic terrorists, who shouted “This is for Allah” before stabbing a woman more than 10 times, helped Khan name the evil.

A fortnight ago, after Australian security authorities foiled an alleged plot to bomb an Etihad Airways flight out of Sydney, Islamic Council of Queensland spokesman Ali Kadri lodged a complaint when Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin described the evil plot as “Islamic-inspired terrorism”.

Why wasn’t the Muslim group condemned by opinionated hosts at the ABC for refusing to name the alleged evil given their eagerness to condemn Trump for the same error of judgment this week? For the same reason the ABC was still leading its news bulletins with the reaction to Trump yet it can barely bring itself to say Islamic or even Islamist ­terrorism; truth in labelling is an ad hoc business on the left.

When Man Haron Monis held hostages at gunpoint in Sydney’s Lindt cafe in December 2014, many on the left rushed to suggest he was mad, not bad. The coroner found otherwise, but it’s a standard response when violence is committed in the name of Islam. No one suggested the 20-year-old driver in Charlottesville was mad, not bad.

When Islamic terrorists strike, we are correctly reminded not to tar all Muslims with the actions of a few. The same may be said of those who marched in Charlottesville. Not all of them are anti-­Semitic nutters or Klansmen or neo-Nazis. Not all of them drove a car into the crowd. But no one warned against tarring everyone at the Unite the Right rally.

Instead, a determined ignorance defines the modern left. Charlottesville mayor and Democrat activist Michael Signer said: “I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in America today right at the doorstep of the White House.” They also could lay the blame for the widespread illiberalism and violence erupting across American campuses at the feet of the divisive identity politics ­fuelled by Democrats such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

It’s a hard truth for the left that the Obama presidency begat the Trump presidency. Rather than blame Trump, it’s worth exploring how the rise of white supremacist groups is an inevitable consequence of identity group politics where groups vie for prominence on the basis of skin colour, race, creed, gender and sexuality.

Writing in The New York Times last year, self-described liberal Mark Lilla concluded that American liberalism had become a flawed movement based on the politics of moral panic about ­racial, gender and sexual identity that prevented it from being a unifying force.

Last week Lilla added to his compelling critique in The Wall Street Journal: “There is a mystery at the core of every suicide, and the story of how a once-successful liberal politics of solidarity became a failed liberal politics of ‘difference’ is not a simple one. Perhaps the best place to begin it is with a slogan: The personal is the political.” As Lilla says, the phrase coined by feminists to unite people has been turned on its head to mean the political is the personal, where the “forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practising rituals of ideological one-upmanship”. The result is a movement that divides people rather than bringing them together.

What’s left of the left is a marketplace of outrage where emotion and politics trump intel­lectual honesty and moral clarity. From blinkered feminists who refuse to focus on real misogyny in the Middle East to human rights activists who mock free speech, from same-sex marriage advocates who trample on tolerance to those who demand that only white supremacists, not Islamic terrorists, be named and shamed, the left has become a hollow shell of hyperbole and hypocrisy.

Claims against Trump and his supporters will have real clout and credibility when the needle on the left’s faulty moral compass stops swinging so feverishly in one direction.

Originally Posted by Miranda DevineTHE RISE of far right white supremacists in the US is a predicable consequence of the left’s pursuit of radical identity politics over the past decade.

They made race an issue, along with gender, sexuality, religion and whatever else they could find to divide us. They set out to divide, with violence and intimidation, and have unleashed the forces of reaction.

Now they are trying to blame President Donald Trump, their nemesis, for the tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a 20-year-old white supremacist allegedly drove his car into a group of protesters, killing a woman.

But Trump is a symptom of the backlash against identity politics, not the cause.

He is being pilloried for letting white bigots off the hook by tweeting after the attack that he condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

His opponents demanded he label the attacks “domestic terrorism”. Yet when Black Lives Matter whipped up a furore that resulted in several police officers being assassinated by black gunmen, where were those demands of President Obama? The double standards are obvious.

There is no excuse for bigotry or white supremacy and Trump and his vice president have condemned it specifically and unequivocally since.

But what is not acknowledged is the initial provocation from leftists that sparked the unrest. Alt-right groups flocked to Charlottesville last week to protest the plan by the city’s Democrat mayor to remove a statue of the widely admired Confederate General Robert E Lee in an attempt to delete history. As anyone knows who has been to the American south, memories of the Civil War are painful. Hundreds of thousands of young southerners lost their lives.

Just yesterday, left-wing protesters in Durham, North Carolina, toppled another monument to soldiers of the Civil war. What gives them the right to whitewash history?

New York Times reporter Sheryl Stolberg, who was at the Charlottesville clash, tweeted that “the hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park …. Among my unanswered questions: police response. Why did things get out of hand so quickly? Could violence have been prevented?”

She was attacked for her heresy and forced to modify her comments.

But there is objective evidence to back up her observations, that both sides were hate-filled and violent, as Trump originally said, and that the police failed to do their job.

No surprise that the governor of Virginia is former Clinton campaign manager Terry McAuliffe, who has been in the news since his $500,000 donation to the election campaign of the wife of FBI official who helped oversee Hillary’s Clinton’s email investigation.

Democrat mayor Mike Signer is another Clinton ally who declared Charlottesville the “Capital of the Resistance” after Trump’s inauguration.

Between them, the two politicians allowed the violence to escalate and the police to retreat.

Originally Posted by Brendan O'NeillEveryone’s smashing statues. From Islamic State hotheads sledgehammering ancient artefacts in old Mesopotamian cities to plummy students at Oxford demanding the removal of busts of old colonialists, waging war on the past is all the rage.

A Year Zero mentality is on the march. People seem hellbent on wiping out history, making it invisible, and starting society all over again, cleansed of the likenesses of dead people of whom they disapprove.

This fury against monuments is presented as good and radical. The statue-smashers say they simply want to erase the faces and names of people who did bad things to show how far society has progressed and to make minority groups feel more comfortable when they’re out in public.

In truth, there’s nothing good in this mob-like erasure of history. It’s a reactionary, even Orwellian, movement. The urge to ethically cleanse public life of “bad history”, to shove down the memory hole any bust or tribute to past folk whose values make us bristle today, is intolerant, illiberal and profoundly paternalistic.

During the past week, the irrational fury against inanimate objects moved up a gear. First, there were the disturbances in Charlottesville, Virginia, when disagreements over a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee descended into violent clashes between leftists and neo-fascists.

A couple of days later, protesters in North Carolina tied rope around the neck of a statue of a Confederate soldier and dragged it down. They kicked and spat on it. There was a weird intensity to their statue abuse, bringing to mind the wide-eyed fury of Islamic State agitators as they stamp on what they view as idolatrous historic carvings in the ancient cities of Palmyra and Nimrud.

Then, in an extraordinary move, the mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, ordered the removal of four Confederate statues in the city. In the dead of night, workmen dragged them down. What had been everyday monuments for decades, seen by people as they walked to work or went for a jog, suddenly were viewed as a poisonous presence, liable to harm people’s self-esteem and the city’s stability. And so they were memory-holed, in the black of night, exposing the febrile streak to this statuephobia.

Year Zero agitation has been gaining ground for a few years. Students at Oxford want a bust of old British colonialist Cecil Rhodes removed. They describe the statue as “problematic”, a word PC zealots use in the same way Islamists say “haram”: to indicate something is wicked and should ideally be extinguished.

One of the protesters against Rhodes says, “There is a violence in having to walk past the statue every day.” There’s a medieval feel to this, this idea that even things made of stone have great power and evil in them.

For an Oxford student to describe a statue as an act of violence really is similar to the Islamic State hammer-wielders’ belief that pre-Islamic icons have the power to pollute men’s souls and thus must be destroyed.

Anyone who thinks this policing of the past will stop once all statues of Confederates and colonialists have been knocked down is in for a shock.

In the US, the Year Zero mob has turned its sights to statues of the great Thomas Jefferson (he owned slaves). And this week Yarra council in Melbourne decreed that it would no longer refer to January 26 as Australia Day, out of respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

So a historic fact — the arrival of the First Fleet into New South Wales in 1788, the basis of Australia Day — is made unmentionable. It’s unremembered, erased, as surely as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four must erase old newspaper reports about events that now embarrass the party. Today’s cleansing of images of history smacks of the dark antics of that fictional Ministry of Truth.

The history erasers claim they only want to show how fair our societies now are. Rubbish. This isn’t about making the present better, it’s a projection of political correctness into the past. It’s the punishment of historical figures — even good historical figures, such as Jefferson, and good historical events, such as the settlement of Australia — for not sharing our exact modern world view.

And it reeks of PC paternalism. The idea that minority groups can’t cope with seeing statues of dead people who did some dodgy things is an affront to their intelligence and autonomy. It infantil­ises them, even suggesting they will feel physically wounded by history: after all, “there is a violence” to these statues.

It’s disturbingly ironic: this treatment of certain groups as fragile, as needing to have public life sanitised on their behalf in the way a new mum might baby-proof her home, is riddled with some fairly racist assumptions of its own.

One of the great things about public life is that it’s a patchwork of the historical events that made our nations. Take a walk through a city and you’ll see statues of soldiers, politicians, authors, suffragettes and others who shaped our societies. And most of them will have held views or done things we would consider questionable in 2017. So what? The point is they made history, and it’s right for the public sphere to reflect that.

The logic of the Year Zero crew is that we should see only historical figures they approve of (if there are any). They police history with an eye for policing what we citizens can see and by extension think about the societies we live in.

It’s a low, brutal form of censorship, and we should have no truck with it.

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